OSSR: TCG: RAGE
Making Sense of it All.
AncientH
Most of the weirdness in this game comes directly out of trying to encapsulate, in a single set, damn near everything that was in Werewolf: the Apocalypse. Even the other changing breeds!
But this was all amateur-hour wolfshit (or bear shit, rat shit, mokole shit, whatever). The game wasn't focused on actual gameplay or strategies, it was focused on trying to translate something of the roleplaying experience into the new medium of collectible card games. So in that sense, it's hard to see it as really a success. As a game, it has severe flaws, weird and kind of pointless mechanics that only a handful of cards interact with, and very few real paths to victory. As an RPG product...well, trying to translate the Werewolf experience to RAGE loses most of what little nuance there was. You kill a bunch of monsters and win. Whoo.
Frank
Rage folded in 1996 and when it was rebooted by Five Rings in 1998 it folded again even faster. The two production runs are
not compatible. Like,
at all. Basically because while there are some interesting ideas in Rage, it is also a fucking mess that isn't remotely salvageable without massively changing very integral parts of it. The Five Rings people came in with rolled up sleeves and a commitment to minimal changes and backward compatibility, and they
still ended up with something that might as well have been written in Sumerian.
One of the key issues of course is that most of the changes from the Five Rings era are weird personal hangups of individual ascended fanbois rather than anything that made objective sense. I get the furious nerfing of Frenzy (because as noted, in the original rules
frenzy is totally bonkers), but why have Gnosis be expended as Gnosis Points instead of being a prerequisite? Presumably someone was upset about some combination of high gnosis gifts or the total worthlessness of some low gnosis gift or both – but changing Gnosis from an individual salary cap to a collective salary cap does a lot more than address some fanboi's pet peeves, it utterly transforms what every Gnosis number on every gift and character
means. Similarly, they tried to enforce variety in combat decks by putting symbols on the combat cards and making you have certain numbers of each – now leaving aside questions of whether that worked (narrator voice: it did not work), the simple and obvious fact is that
none of the combat cards from the first set have those symbols and thus none of them can be used. Full fucking stop.
And then some of the things the Five Rings guys got a bug up their ass about just make no sense to me. Regeneration is slower. Why? It takes two fucking turns, the game is fucking over in two turns, why is this a thing?
AncientH
It's hard to say what the legacy of RAGE was. I mean, obviously it still has a fanbase, which is more than can be said for games like HIGHLANDER: THE CARD GAME or SIM CITY: THE CARD GAME; nobody fucking wants to put out new cards for HERESY or HYBORIAN GATES. But I am kind of tied as to what the appeal is, especially now that the game that inspired it - Werewolf: the Apocalypse - is scheduled for a 5th edition in 2021.
No, really.
Frank
Free for all card playing is one of those things that sounds like a good idea when you are ten. That's it. That's the statement.
The number of times in this game where you'd really like to declare your action before an opponent declares theirs or where you'd both like to declare an action and you'd rather declare your action after your opponent declares theirs is just way too high in this game. I'm not saying there aren't places you could improve the timing on Magic (I believe there is basically no reason for there to be a place for people to cast spells between first strike damage and regular damage, for example), but the basic idea that there should be a formal priority of play in which the speed with which you can slap a card on the table or the amount of time you can stare at your opponent without playing a card is never a thing that makes mechanical difference is just fucking obvious. There just isn't an argument that slow play or intrusive shouting should ever give a mechanical advantage in a fucking card game.
It doesn't really matter what the formal card playing priority is. It could go around the table to the left or be assigned by player age. I legit don't give two shits. It just has to be
something unambiguous so that we don't ever have to resort to shouting matches and staring contests.
AncientH
What this game needed was solid basics which could then be built up and expanded upon in later sets. Like fucking Settlers of Catan. You don't start off with the goddamn fish in Settlers. You trade wood for sheep and
earn your way to the goddamn fish. If you strip this game down to its basics, you could have maybe four tribes, a dozen Garou per tribe, and work out how each tribe had at least two possible viable routes to victory. You don't need Rites, Quests, Caerns, or the Umbra - you can add all that shit in later, if it's important.
But they didn't do that.
Frank
The thing where other players play cards for the monsters you hunt is just fundamentally incompatible with being a collectible card game. At least, as long as the monster you are fighting comes from
your deck and the combat cards played for the monster comes from
their deck. It would be like if your opponent in Magic the Gathering had cards they needed to tap your lands to cast and if they weren't the right colors they could get rekt.
Nowhere is this incongruity more obvious than the fucking Elder Vampire. It can use Shadowlords gifts. It has a really high Rage and Gnosis. If you go into combat with the thing and your opponent is happening to be sitting on two copies of True Fear and two copies of Massive Wound,
you lose. It doesn't matter if you've frenzied up your whole fucking combat deck and have a gajillion attacks and defenses, you take 10 damage before you are allowed to play a combat maneuver. And that's the whole opera from overture to finale. But generally that isn't going to happen. There's 13 tribes and only
one of the Shadowlords gifts is a thing you particularly give a shit if the Elder Vampire busts it out. Your opponents probably don't have Shadowlords in their deck, and if they do they still probably don't have True Fear. One of the Shadowlords can't even fucking use that card due to gnosis requirements.
If they wanted to do something like this, probably you should have to put up 20 Renown worth of enemies for your opponents to attack. If you
really wanted to get sassy, you could have combat cards be double sided where they did one thing for team hero and another thing for team villain. You could even have it be such that some of the cards were “good” on one side and kind of shit on the other so there could be tradeoffs withholding cards that were good for monster hunting or good for team monster.
Regardless, the key revelation is that you should never be making a deck out of trading cards that you are then expected to play cards out of meeting the prerequisites on cards that are factually in another deck designed by another person who is in direct competition with you. The incentives are just all fucking backwards here.
AncientH
The two-deck (Combat & Sept) concept by itself isn't stupid. A little logistically weird, sure, but I think there's something to be said for having a distinct split in resources. That being said, there is less of a strict division between the two decks than there should be. Way too many Sept cards either initiate or effect combat; for fuck's sake, some of them deal damage - more damage than Combat Action cards! If you're going to have a division like this, it needs to be fundamental.
Frank
Attempting to do 13 tribes in the first set was a terrible idea. Just in general the card set tried to spread itself way too thin. But the fact that it tries to have thirteen fucking suits is pretty emblematic of how dumb this all is. Everything that shows up is way too much of a cameo. They need room to breathe. If you're going to have quests, you should have enough of them to have meaningful choices. And that extends to every fucking part of this Don't include the Umbra if you aren't going to include enough Umbra for it to matter.
But basically there should be few enough tribes in the first set that you could have an example character at each Renown level. Which means the absolute maximum that should have been in the first set is 7. That is, by the way, coincidentally the number of clans in the first set of Jyhad/V:tES. That's not an accident. It's about the limit of a plausible card set of this type. There's nothing wrong with having
less suits, but you sure as fuck can't have
more. L5R hit the shelves with 6 factions, Magic the Gathering with 5. All of those are reasonable. And with further expansions you could either add factions (L5R, VtES, Shadowfist), or you could keep the number of teams static (M:tG, Netrunner). Either is defensible as a lifestyle.
But basically there shouldn't have been both the Get of Fenris and the Red Talons and the Shadowlords – because all those dumb assholes are basically the same thing. That goes for the original source material as well, of course, but at the very least when making a card game there should be a hard think about how many card slots were needed to do justice to anything. And what they actually delivered was too scattershot and bullshit to do anything.
AncientH
Then there's the dog sex...look, Werewolf: the Apocalypse is what it is. I wish it were different. It would be a lot easier on everyone if it was just humans that turned into wolves and there was no dogfucking at all. That is the entire werewolf concept, when you boil it down: a man that turns into a monster, not a wolf that figures out it can fucking talk and pump gas.
And the thing is, a lot of shit in this game just makes
no sense unless you're already elbow deep in the asshole of Werewolf lore. The Wyrm barely gets an explanation in the rules, the cards sure as shit don't help. Yes, the roleplayers know what Pentex is and what it means when you play a Pentex enemy on the board, but the casual players that picked up this game? Did they have
any fucking clue what was going on? Do the cards actually communicate the game setting and plot well?
Fuck no.
Frank
Several times in this review I have found myself with mouth agape at some card or another that creates a hidden variable and just asks you to remember it for the rest of the game. That's not remotely acceptable. But it's also not
necessary. In Magic you turn cards sideways to track used resources. In Vampiee you have little beads that you lose and spend to track damage and payment. Having a game where you count everything by leaving actual cards behind with numbers on them is
fine. That's how Dominion works, and it's
fine. But if that's your plan, you have to stick to that plan.
You
could have things where every lasting effect was a card and that card stayed attached to whatever it was affecting until the effect was over. It just requires discipline. If a Block reduces damage, it needs to stay attached to the damage card it is modifying. And so on. You just can't have this “twice in the game...” shit. That's not OK.
And yeah, if you don't want to maintain card attachment discipline, it would be fine to have counters for health and victory points. Really, honestly, that would be fine. But if you say “This game doesn't use counters” then you need to stick that landing.
AncientH
There's no real distinction between card mechanics and flavor text. That sounds weird, because that is the simplest, most basic fucking thing to do. Magic figured that shit out years before RAGE hit the market, and they still managed to fuck that up. I can't even.
Frank
Why do we have victory piles if the game ends when we hit a specific number of victory points? I think the game would work a lot better if there was a fixed number of turns and the highest victory point total was the winner. As is, it's actually possible for all the packs to get wiped out without anyone hitting the magic number 20. There doesn't need to be a magic number at all! There could just be five full turns and whoever has the biggest victory pile at the end wins.
If you really wanted to go crazy, you could have night events like moon phases and police crackdowns and shit and flip one of them over each turn. You could even have a thing where the players brought their own “2nd night” and “3rd night” event cards and then you randomly determined whose got used for each turn.
AncientH
Or just use a 20-sided die to keep track of things.
The turn-counting down thing would actually work really well given the basic logistics of the game. Because the logistics are that you start with pretty much everything you have, and it's all fucking downhill from there. You may gain new allies and gear and gifts, but your pack is going to dwindle and the Hunting Grounds are going to fill up with enemies and oh shit the Apocalypse is coming. Having a turn/time limit would add pathos and drama to a game that can easily boil down to a bunch of furry kids voting and talking about dogpiling and people nearby are wondering if that's a sex thing.
Frank
Perhaps the most fundamental issue with Rage is that it is associated with Werewolf: the Apocalypse, which is an IP that is offensive and bad. Stripping the real White Wolf elements of this game out of this game would improve it in pretty much all cases. This would be a better game if it was
generic werewolves fighting against
generic demons.
But even if you do keep it “W:tA flavored” for marketing reasons, stick to the generic “werewolves are cool” part. Mentioning that the veterinarian is specifically related to your character but that your character has to have had dogs for parents is just... ew. That shit is gross, and it doesn't
add anything. The vet could just be an actual normal veterinarian. They don't need to be a blood relative, and they
especially don't need to be a blood relative to an actual fucking dog. Like, what the actual fuck? Why is that a thing I need to say?
AncientH
It's always hard to wrap these things up, because we're just talking about a card game, not a book. There is no index and character sheets and back cover to tell us it's over. We just wind up having less and less to say about what's left.
If there's a lesson to be learned in RAGE, beyond "don't do that," I think it's that love will carry a game a long way. A longer fucking way than mere sanity and rationality will. Fans have carried this game like fucking Samwise Gamgee hauling Frodo's dead fucking weight up the slopes of Mount Doom. But in the end, like the One Ring itself, this shit needs to burn. It may be precious to you, but it cannot be saved or redeemed.